1. Field of the Invention
Methods and apparatuses consistent with the present invention relate to wireless communication, and in particular, to a wireless communication method and apparatus that can share performance information for wireless communication between devices and use the performance information.
2. Description of the Related Art
The transmission of mass multimedia data in a wireless network has been increasingly demanded, and studies for an effective transmission method in a wireless network environment have been demanded. In addition, a necessity for wireless transmission of a high-quality video, such as a digital video disk (DVD) video, a high definition television (HDTV) video, or the like, among various home devices tends to increase.
At present, an IEEE 802.15.3c task group is considering a technical standard for transmitting mass data in a wireless home network. This standard, called Millimeter Wave (mmWave), uses an electrical wave having a physical wavelength of several millimeters for the sake of the transmission of the mass data (that is, an electrical wave having a frequency of 30 GHz to 300 GHz). In the related art, this frequency band is an unlicensed band and is limitedly used for, for example, communication carriers, radio astronomy, or vehicle anti-collision.
In the IEEE 802.11b standard or the IEEE 802.11g standard, a carrier frequency is 2.4 GHz, and a channel bandwidth is about 20 MHz. Further, in the IEEE 802.11a standard or the IEEE 802.11n standard, a carrier frequency is 5 GHz, and a channel bandwidth is about 20 MHz. In contrast, in the mmWave, a carrier frequency of 60 GHz is used, and a channel bandwidth is about 0.5 to 2.5 GHz. Accordingly, it can be seen that the mmWave uses much larger carrier frequency and channel bandwidth than the existing IEEE 802.11 standards. As such, if a high-frequency signal having a wavelength in millimeters (Millimeter Wave) is used, a high transmission rate of several Gbps can be obtained, and the size of an antenna can be set to be not more than 1.5 mm. Then, a single chip including the antenna can be implemented.
In recent years, the transmission of uncompressed audio and/or video (A/V) data between wireless apparatuses using a high bandwidth of the millimeter wave has been studied. Compressed A/V data is compressed with a partial loss through processes, such as motion compensation, discrete cosine transform (DCT) conversion, quantization, variable length coding, and the like, such that portions insensitive to the sense of sight or the sense of hearing of a human being are eliminated. Accordingly, in case of the compressed A/V data, deterioration in image quality due to a compression loss may occur. Further, A/V data compression and decompression of the transmitting device and the receiving device need to follow the same standard. In contrast, uncompressed A/V data includes digital values (for example, R, G, and B components) representing pixel components as they are. Accordingly, in case of the uncompressed A/V data, vivid image quality can be provided.
As such, in a high-frequency wireless communication band, a large volume of data is transmitted, and thus more efficient wireless communication needs to be performed. If the individual devices constituting each wireless network can share information about device-supportable performance among the devices, the devices can performs optimum communication in a current communication environment by referring to the performance information of other devices. Accordingly, a technology that shares information about device-supportable performance among the devices is highly demanded.